Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Replace SEO

Monday, August 30, 2010 posted by admin 9:13 pm

Looking at the latest search marketing conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future.

To a certain extent, they are.

Social media, and social networking in particular, create a back-and-forth conversation with your target audience, so you can virally market your website through the “buzz” that can be created. When something interesting, cool, or unique is being talked about in “all the right places,” it can certainly provide a boost in website traffic.

We search marketers tend to hang out in numerous online and offline communities where it’s easy to promote our own products and services, yet I can’t help wondering if our view of Web marketing is skewed because of this.

Are potential B2B clients and even B2C customers spending time at Digg? Do they attend SEM conferences in order to hire a company, or are they just trying to learn to do it themselves? And what about other industries? Is there a Sphinn equivalent for developers of product lifecycle management software? Are there groups of people online comparing the various brands of auto parts? Are there really people seeking out articles on these topics?

Perhaps.

And if so, we’d be remiss not to promote our clients’ websites in those spaces. But is this search marketing? Or is it simply marketing? Arguably, it becomes search marketing when it increases link popularity, but surely that should be the secondary goal of this type of marketing campaign. True link popularity comes from having something worth linking to, not something you’ve asked your insulated circle of cronies to link to.

Certainly, the boost in direct traffic that a site can gain when it is being discussed in all the right places online is not to be taken lightly – and that alone is reason enough to try to be found in all the right places. Yet how much of that traffic actually converts into anything good, and how much does it help your organic search rankings?

More important – how does it incréase your bottom line? Readmore…

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Category : SEO, SMM, Social Media

Tactics for Getting Those Top 5 Spots in Google

Friday, August 27, 2010 posted by admin 6:48 pm

Tactics for Getting Those Top 5 Spots in GoogleActually, getting in the #1 spot is best, but I will settle for the top 5 or even anywhere on the first page for very competitive keywords. Obtaining those top rankings for your targeted keywords in Google will obviously be very important to achieving your online goals.

I don’t have some magic formula, just marketing online stuff that works. Very simple stuff that everybody can do to get those top rankings. Here are some of the tactics/things I do:

– article marketing through the free article directories

– create videos on my niche products

– make blog posts in my niche areas

– do press releases for my targeted products

– create free ebook guides on my subject areas

– build separate lists for each major niche market with follow-up emails

– participate in online forums with my sig links added

– make regular tweets about any new content

– find out my competitors’ main backlinks and duplicate them

– create Google Alerts for my major keywords and add comments/links to the ones I like

– keep adding fresh content pages to my sites keyworded to phrases used by buyers
Readmore…

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Category : Google, SEO

8 Things Bing Won’t Tell You

Monday, August 23, 2010 posted by admin 6:44 pm

Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)

But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):

1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot

Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.

2.) There is No Sandbox

Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.
Readmore…

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Category : SEO